Echoes of a 1972 Loss Haunt a 2004 Campaign

BOSTON - It was the campaign that seemed to have everything. A rented mainframe computer and a sophisticated telephone voter list when typewriters and index cards were still common. A legion of eager volunteers, including a bike-riding boarding school student named Caroline Kennedy. Plenty of cash, celebrity supporters and a compelling first-time candidate: John Kerry.

But in the end, the 1972 Democratic campaign for Congress in the Fifth District of Massachusetts, stretching from the gritty old mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell to the upscale suburbs of Lexington and Concord, lacked one big thing: voters. Mr. Kerry lost to his Republican opponent in a district George McGovern carried, after a bitter battle in which his antiwar protests were attacked, his patriotism was questioned and he himself was derided as an elitist careerist. His political future seemed shattered before it began.

Months later, a sympathetic profile in The Worcester Telegram summed up Mr. Kerry's predicament on a day he had been doing errands, ran out of gas, then headed to the car wash. "All of a sudden, water started washing over my shoes!" Mr. Kerry explained in the article. "The car was filling up with water! Water was coming out of every orifice! I could see the headlines: 'John Kerry, Former Congressional Candidate, Drowned in Car Wash.' "

The article continued: "Obviously, John Kerry is a loser. Only losers have days like this." And Mr. Kerry himself offered a terse assessment: "How did I feel when I lost? Lousy. I guess you learn from it. I'm not sure just what yet."

Thirty-two years later, Mr. Kerry is once again surrounded by many of the loyalists from that first campaign - the only one he has ever lost. He is once again on the defensive over his Vietnam War service and his antiwar record, once again facing a Republican opponent who mocks him as an out-of-touch elitist, once again fighting to fulfill his campaign's early promise.

So what are the lessons Mr. Kerry learned so long ago? To hit back hard when attacked? To bide his time and ration the early passion that made him such an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and such an eloquent, appealing candidate, but also a target of criticism? Perhaps a bit of both. From that election to this, his career has been marked more by cautious calculation than bold strokes, and to a striking degree, his vulnerabilities then remain his vulnerabilities now.

Mr. Kerry's supporters acknowledge the parallels between 1972 and 2004. But they also insist that he long ago learned the lessons of that searing defeat - lessons that sent him on a slow, patient detour to law school and work as a prosecutor and private lawyer, before his return to politics and his election as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982 and senator two years later.

"I think it helped John enormously that he did not get elected," said Thomas Vallely, a fellow Vietnam veteran who worked for Mr. Kerry then and is working for him now. "If he'd gone from Congress, from being a star, right to some higher job, he wouldn't have had the political skills he acquired going to law school, becoming a prosecutor, running for lieutenant governor and Senate," all in campaigns that seemed to involve what Mr. Vallely called "near-death experiences."

"Did he learn in Lowell, always fight back?" Mr. Vallely asked. "Yes, but John's always been a pretty good fighter." And, he added, "Kerry's cooler now. He's cooler. I mean, he's less - he's more skilled. He's not nervous."

Dan Payne, another aide in that first race, said that Mr. Kerry had developed "a kind of toughness that allows him to take hits," and that he was "willing to go through these very difficult plunges in his fortunes."

Mr. Kerry does not have 10 weeks left until Election Day, much less 10 months or 10 years to cross the finish line. So an examination of the 1972 race, and his reaction to it, offers fresh insights into the tasks he faces now, and his ability to accomplish them.

"I took a shellacking," he said in an interview this summer, before stopping to correct himself. "A shellacking's the wrong word. I took a shellacking in the sense that I couldn't make it happen. But I didn't take a shellacking, because we accomplished a hell of a lot - young kids, 26, 27 years old, putting this thing together without any political expertise." And, he added, "sadly, not being quite aware of what was happening to us in the final weeks. If I knew then what I know about things today, I'm not sure I would have ever done it."

Mr. Kerry had first considered a race for Congress two years earlier, just after he was released from active duty in the Navy in the winter of 1970. The district he eyed was the Third, stretching across the western suburbs of Boston from Fitchburg to Newton. But by the time he decided to explore challenging the hawkish Democratic incumbent, Philip J. Philbin, there was already a clear front-runner: the Rev. Robert F. Drinan, the Jesuit dean of Boston College Law School, who had become a prominent opponent of the war.

Nevertheless, Mr. Kerry made a speech at a caucus of party liberals intended to choose the consensus candidate to take on the incumbent. "He really wowed the crowd," recalled Mr. Payne, who was Father Drinan's campaign press secretary and later worked on several of Mr. Kerry's own campaigns.

In the end, however, "my people had the votes," Father Drinan said in an interview. Mr. Kerry went on to support Father Drinan's successful campaign. Later that spring, he married Julia Stimson Thorne in a big Long Island ceremony. The bride wore a gown from a relative's 1786 wedding, at which Alexander Hamilton had been best man and George Washington a guest, and The New York Times's lengthy account declared, "Whether today's wedding becomes a similar footnote to history may depend on the bridegroom."

Over the next year and a half, Mr. Kerry became a more or less full-time antiwar activist. He served as principal fund-raiser and public spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a grass-roots group that divided its efforts between dramatic street demonstrations and, eventually, civil disobedience and Mr. Kerry's more traditional, establishment oratory and approach.

He appeared more than once on "The Dick Cavett Show." In April 1971 he helped organize the mass veterans' protest march on Washington in which he and others threw their military decorations over a fence outside the Capitol, and he became celebrated overnight for asking the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

But as 1971 wore on, Mr. Kerry, who had been raising most of the group's money from celebrities like Jane Fonda and others, grew increasingly wary of the organization's more radical elements, and disillusioned with its anarchic nature. "I began to sense there were some folks out there on their own doing their stuff and calling it V.V.A.W.," he said this summer. "I just said, 'It's not my cup of tea.' And the agenda began to expand beyond antiwar to different this, social that, whatever. It just lost its way."

Mr. Kerry said he decided that politics, not protesting, would give him "greater strength and the ability to make something happen."

What he wanted was to end the war as quickly as possible, and he decided to run for Congress on an antiwar platform in 1972.

But to do so, he would have to move. He was living in Waltham, represented by Father Drinan. So the Kerrys bought a house in Worcester, hometown of the Fourth District's aging incumbent, Harold D. Donohue. But before they even moved in, the moderate Republican incumbent in the neighboring Democratic-majority Fifth District, Bradford Morse, announced his retirement to accept a United Nations post, leaving that seat open. Mr. Kerry, not yet 29, leapt.

Mr. Kerry's parents had lived in the Fifth District during his years at Yale and in Vietnam, but his sudden switch left him open to charges of opportunism, which have dogged him ever since. "If he doesn't stop House hunting soon," The Boston Herald Traveler wrote, "he'll not only need a campaign manager but a full-time real estate agent."

Because Morse had represented the district for so long, a crowded field of Democrats was eager to compete for his seat. None welcomed Mr. Kerry, who had support from celebrities, cash from New York, a core of young volunteers like Ms. Kennedy and the support of big-name national Democrats, who cut no ice in the working-class bars of Lowell.

"I remember McGovern coming up to Lowell and talking about John Kerry, not realizing it was a nine-person primary, and not realizing that that alienated people," said Martin T. Meehan, who was then a sophomore in high school working for one of Mr. Kerry's primary opponents and now represents the district in the House.

In the rented house in Lowell that Mr. Kerry used as an early staging area, he displayed color photographs of himself sailing with John F. Kennedy in the one place they were certain to be seen by visiting volunteers and workers: the bathroom.

Father Drinan summed up the situation: "Every Democrat in Lowell and Lawrence has been lusting for this seat for 25 years. Kerry comes along and wipes them out. There's real hatred there."

Mr. Vallely, who had started in politics as Father Drinan's driver in the 1970 campaign and later went to work for Mr. Kerry, offered a contemporary example to illustrate the upstart campaign's sense of itself.

"It was like the Dean campaign," he said. "It had enormous energy. We had thousands of volunteers. We had a computer, which we rented. It was a mainframe. We thought we were at the cutting edge of technology and American politics would never be the same again."

That computer was at the center of one of the campaign's most embarrassing episodes. On the eve of the primary, Mr. Vallely and Mr. Kerry's younger brother, Cameron, both 22, had gone out to dinner and returned to their headquarters to learn that an anonymous caller had telephoned to report that the campaign's phone lines were being cut.

"Our Internet was the telephone," Mr. Vallely said. "A couple hundred lines and all related to our voter ID, and how we're mailing to them. This was the central organizing tool that we're using." So Mr. Vallely and Cam Kerry kicked down the door to the building's basement and hurried downstairs, only to find themselves surrounded moments later by the Lowell police and charged with breaking and entering.

The same building also housed the headquarters of one of Mr. Kerry's Democratic rivals, State Representative Anthony R. DiFruscia of Lawrence, and he accused the Kerry campaign of a Watergate-style break-in. Mr. Vallely and both Kerrys maintain that the incident was a setup intended to embarrass them.

Still, the next day Mr. Kerry carried 18 of the district's 22 towns, with 28 percent of the vote. The Republicans nominated Paul W. Cronin, a former state representative and one-time aide to Morse. A poll conducted about two weeks later by The Boston Globe showed Mr. Kerry leading 51 to 24 percent, with 7 percent for an independent candidate, Roger P. Durkin, a conservative Democrat.

The general election would be a different story. Paul J. Sheehy, a state representative from Lowell who came in second to Mr. Kerry in the primary, never believed Mr. Kerry could win in November. "Let me just tell you one thing," he said in a recent interview. "The whole theme of our advertising was 'Vote for the Democrat Who Can Win.' " To Mr. Sheehy, a young, liberal, antiwar candidate was not a good fit with a district dominated by Lawrence and Lowell, which had a special term of derision for a newcomer: "blow-in." He did not endorse Mr. Kerry in the general election.

"I don't think he reached out to anybody, to people who were active in the Democratic Party, who could provide any support to him," Mr. Sheehy said. "I think it was naïveté, and he believed his press clippings, perhaps, and didn't really understand the makeup of the district."

Mr. Kerry also faced the wrath of the ultraconservative editor of The Lowell Sun, Clement C. Costello, who would later urge the United States to annex Canada and invade Mexico in answer to the 1970's oil crisis. In October 1972, Mr. Kerry was the main target of Mr. Costello, who ran a smoldering series of four editorials denouncing the young candidate. Each was accompanied by an anti-Kerry cartoon, with the climax, called "The Rape of the Fifth," showing a gloating Mr. Kerry standing atop the prone body of a woman representing the district.

"Mr. Kerry is more interested in what the Fifth can give him, namely a seat in Congress, than what he can give the Fifth," one editorial read in part. "He wants the national sounding board from which he can disseminate the radical ideas contained in his 'books and lectures,' and the welfare of the Fifth District and its people is secondary."

One of the books the Sun editorials attacked was "The New Soldier," a long essay on the antiwar veterans' movement by Mr. Kerry and his brother-in-law and Yale classmate David Thorne, with photographs by their friend George Butler. Its cover showed bearded veterans holding an American flag upside down, in a sign of distress. The Sun saw it as a sign of deep disrespect.

Mr. Kerry, seared by his combat experience in the Mekong Delta and embittered by the death of close friends in the war, had made Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign. He found it hard to display similarly persuasive passion for the bread-and-butter economic issues that were of greater concern to many of the district's voters.

"It was a depressed area, Democratic area, unemployment high," recalled Edward F. Cox, the husband of Richard M. Nixon's daughter Tricia, who had recently been a part-time prosecutor in Lowell and who was sent by the Republicans to campaign against Kerry that fall. "Kerry couldn't communicate with the basic blue-collar Democratic voter, even though they should have been inclined to be for him."

Mr. Kerry's antiwar activities had drawn intense scrutiny by top aides in the Nixon White House, and by the F.B.I. and the president himself, as Nixon tapes unearthed by The Boston Globe last year make clear. But Mr. Cox said he had not been part of a concerted White House effort to target Mr. Kerry.

"If anything else was going on, I wasn't informed of that," he said in a recent telephone interview. "This was just another stop."

The final blow came just three days before the election when Mr. Durkin, the independent candidate, dropped out and threw his support to the Republicans. Mr. Kerry lost by 18,123 votes out of 207,623 cast - almost nine percentage points - carrying only three towns.

Some contemporary observers contend that Mr. Kerry doomed himself from the start with his emphasis on Vietnam.

Martin Linsky, then a 31-year-old state representative who was the Republican nominee against Father Drinan in the neighboring Third District, said Mr. Kerry's "view of himself was inextricable from his role in opposition to Vietnam."

Mr. Linsky, now a lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, added in a recent e-mail message: "Cronin and The Lowell Sun took Kerry's one great advantage, his celebrity status as an antiwar activist and his self-immersion in that role, and turned it into a liability in every possible way, pounding away: on the war itself, on the out-of-district funding for his campaign, on his relative unfamiliarity with the district and on Cronin's legacy from their beloved Brad Morse, who had delivered the goods. Because it all had the ring of some truth, and because Kerry was so understandably committed to the nobility of the view of himself as the righteous antiwar crusader, Kerry colluded in his demise by defending that image of himself and thus allowing Cronin, and The Sun, to set the agenda for what the campaign would be about, a conversation that Kerry could not win even if his defense was compelling."

"That," Mr. Linsky added, "sounds a lot like what happened between the two conventions this summer."

In the aftermath of defeat, Mr. Kerry retreated, building model ships and planes and contemplating his options. He took some time off, then got a job as a New England regional coordinator for an arm of CARE, the relief organization.

"That was a sad thing," Father Drinan recalled. "Then he went to Boston College Law School after that. So we all said, 'Good, he's settled down.' "

Ahead of Mr. Kerry lay patient years in the Middlesex County prosecutor's office, private law practice and an unlikely comeback as Michael S. Dukakis's lieutenant governor and a senator, both times against primary opponents who had broader support among Democratic regulars in the clannish world of Massachusetts politics, a world in which even today Mr. Kerry remains a conspicuous outsider.

But those who have known him longest and best say the memory of 1972 is never far from Mr. Kerry's mind. In his 1984 Senate race, when his primary opponent, Representative James M. Shannon, a protégé of Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill and the establishment's favorite, questioned his protesting the war in Vietnam after having served there, Mr. Kerry struck back hard.

In a televised debate late in the campaign, Mr. Shannon accused Mr. Kerry of flip-flopping on Vietnam, saying, "If you felt that strongly about the war, you would not have gone." In the next debate, Mr. Kerry attacked, insisting, "You impugn the service of veterans in that war by saying they are somehow dopes or wrong for going." Mr. Shannon tried to dodge the exchange, saying, "John, you know that dog won't hunt."

And so was born "the Doghunters," a group of Vietnam veterans like Mr. Vallely who had known Mr. Kerry in the war or in his antiwar days or in his work with veterans. They helped turn the race around, and have been a part of every Kerry campaign since. At a similarly tough moment in Mr. Kerry's 1996 re-election race against Gov. William Weld, the crew of Mr. Kerry's Vietnam Swift boat also came to the rescue, and they remain active in his current campaign.

Now, in the wake of a month of harsh attacks on Mr. Kerry's character, military record and antiwar activity by the group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the White House itself, Mr. Vallely, Mr. Thorne and others from that first campaign are working to help Mr. Kerry make his case once more after newer advisers initially urged him to avoid getting drawn into the fray. Polls show that the attacks apparently succeeded in raising doubts about Mr. Kerry, and undermining his campaign's central biographical rationale, just when many voters were first tuning in to the race. Some old colleagues worry that irreparable damage has already been done.

"There are a lot of people who have stayed with John in every campaign since '72, who learned a difficult lesson," said Mr. Payne, another veteran of the first campaign who is now watching from the sidelines, having been replaced as Mr. Kerry's media adviser in the 1996 Senate campaign by Robert Shrum, who is playing the same role now.

"You cannot assume because you are a war hero that you will not be attacked for your military service," Mr. Payne said. "That's why I think this time it was so disconcerting that his campaign was telling him not to react to things that he had seen 30 years ago destroy him. There was no reason to assume that people who are now involved with John Kerry in leadership positions would know anything about that campaign."

Now, in the wake of a month of harsh attacks on Mr. Kerry's character, military record and antiwar activity by the group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the White House itself, . . . Polls show that the attacks apparently succeeded in raising doubts about Mr. Kerry, and undermining his campaign's central biographical rationale, just when many voters were first tuning in to the race. Some old colleagues worry that irreparable damage has already been done.

A bitter pill for readers of the Times to swallow.

"The article continued: "Obviously, John Kerry is a loser. Only losers have days like this." And Mr. Kerry himself offered a terse assessment: "How did I feel when I lost? Lousy. I guess you learn from it. I'm not sure just what yet."

Thirty-two years later, Mr. Kerry is once again..."

...a loser.

Mr. Kerry, seared by his combat experience in the Mekong Delta and embittered by the death of close friends in the war, had made Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign.

Wow. Imagine that.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I find it interesting how W has played a rope-a-dope strategery this year. He let the demokrats swing and swing and swing at him up to th convention, and then came in fresh for the kill. I was mad at W earlier for not responding more, but it seems to have worked out (although with a lot of help from the Swifties).

Kerry can take a punch at all. He has a big glass jaw.

"I began to sense there were some folks out there on their own doing their stuff and calling it V.V.A.W.," he said this summer. "I just said, 'It's not my cup of tea.'"

Try to imagine our present Commander-in-Chief EVER saying, "It's not my cup of tea."

" I was mad at W earlier for not responding more, but it seems to have worked out (although with a lot of help from the Swifties)."

It was an absolute jungle ambush. He let Kerry march in confidently as a Vietnam hero, and then let the SBV dismantle him in the crossfire. Kerry was warned month before, but failed to respond.

Ooooh....it would almost be worth being a reporter to be able to interview Terayza...think of the things you could coax her to say if you really wanted to.

I am surprised that the author didn't mention Senator Tom Eagleton -- like Senator Kerry's campaign, Senator McGovern's grew rocky when it was found that one of them had had mental problems, though in McGovern's case, it was the vice presidential candidate, not the presidential one. (After today's performance, can anyone not wonder if Senator Kerry is undergoing some very serious problems?)

Like McGovern's campaign, Kerry's campaign also appears to be on its way to a major defeat, perhaps another historic one. Good riddance to it; after the embarrassing episode today, insulting Iraq's interim leader, I believe that Senator Kerry should slink away.

"I just said, 'It's not my cup of tea.'"

By "it," Kerry seems to mean assassinating Senators during the 1971 Christmas recess. What a man of courage.

sKerry was "an idiot" (to quote tahrayzah) for doing that. I think his calculation was that he was going to play up his Vietnam "service", so that W would be unable to criticize his anti-war record. He kinda forgot about all those Vietnam veterans he slandered. Payback is h*ll. Also, sKerry is about the most inherently unlikable politician in history. I think that he actually beats Sore Loserman in that category.

"All of a sudden, water started washing over my shoes!" Mr. Kerry explained in the article. "The car was filling up with water! Water was coming out of every orifice! I could see the headlines: 'John Kerry, Former Congressional Candidate, Drowned in Car Wash.' "

He's just lucky Teddy wasn't driving the car. He would have drown.

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